Collect the answers and review them to assess how well your students are able to identify the main point and supporting evidence in a longer work of writing. Here, generally, is what you might look for:

What’s the point?

This nation has been in a racial stalemate for decades.

How does he back it up?

I’m here today because of the Reverand White scandal – African Americans are angry and have legitimate concerns about discrimination

White americans are angry – they have worked hard and resent affirmative action, e.g, “your dream coming at my expense.”

African and White Americans often focus their anger on each other –and often behind closed doors – and that is not helpful.

So What?

Now is the time to break through the racial stalemate and focus on our common needs: Our union may never be perfect, but it can always be perfected, thanks to princibles on which it was found.

Having challenged your own thinking, it is now time to challenge your students’ thinking. The objective is to enable them to figure out whether an argument, whether oral or written, is well structured.

On this site, when we us the term “structure,” we will be talking about the basic argument of the essay or written piece. A piece of writing is well structured if it can answer three basic questions:

What’s your point?

How do you back it up? (We are looking for evidence, not emotional claims or opinions.)

So what? (Why do we need to know it? What are the implications of the argument overall?)

Great written works have great structure. Consider, for example, the following:

Abe Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: June 1, 1865

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Now let’s see if this passes the structure test:

What’s the point?

These soldiers did not die in vain.

How do you back it up?

Our country was founded on noble principles: equality and freedom.

These are the principles these soldiers fought for.

So what?

If we don’t commit to the cause of these soldiers, our country as we know it, will cease to exist.

Wow…It passes with flying colors. (And as we’ll see in the next unit, Abe also does a great job of adding some bling to make his speech sing.)

Practical Tips: How can you help your students become better writers?

Because structure is so important, it is useful to get your students to think about it all the time:

Take 10 or 15 minutes (ideally several times a week) to have them formulate a short argument in response to an open-ended question. Such questions can be general (e.g., What is success?) or specific to a work you are studying in class (e.g., Would Atticus Finch have been a more effective defender of Tom Robinson (and Civil Rights) if he had been more publicly outraged over the discrimination he saw around him?) SAT prompts are great questions to assign for this exercise, and a list of such prompts is listed below.

The goal is to have students think about such questions for a few minutes, and formulate an argument outline – as though they were getting ready to write an essay — by answering:

What’s my point?

How do I back it up?

So What? (Why do we need to know this?)

Then they can take turns getting a little improvisational speaking practice by sharing their outlines aloud with the class.

This activity is a wonderful way to maximize use of your class time: Post the question on the board as a “do now” activity for students to work on as soon as they enter the classroom.